Queer Fashion & The Camp Strategies of Charles Jeffrey’s LOVERBOY

In recent years a new band of transgressive designers, often with menswear backgrounds, have debuted upon the catwalk. Borrowing from the aesthetics of drag, nightlife and subculture, practitioners have adopted queer tactics such as camp in order to unsettle our expectations of so-called men's fashion and indeed of gender itself. These approaches relate to both an explicitly political programmatic and also earlier moments of subversion, particularly those from the 1980s which also grew from and within club cultures. Focusing on the work of Charles Jeffrey, this paper aims to assess the cultural significance and scope of these new modes of design. It situates Loverboy in relation the more reformist strategies of the early 2000s, such as Hedi Slimane, and attempts to move towards a taxonomy of queer fashion practice.